Fostering a Student-Centered Campus
October 14 – 15, 2026 | Denver, CO
Transform your leadership strategy into structural change for student-centered success.
What You'll Gain
- Understand what your students actually experience day to day, not the version of it your policies assume.
- Proactively remove the friction and inconveniences that quietly erode retention, trust, and enrollment.
- Build a concrete plan for the policy and culture changes it takes to make student-centered service real across your institution, not just in one office.
- Move the needle on retention with a roadmap you can act on the moment you’re back on campus.
Overview
If you want to move the needle on retention, start by understanding what your students experience day to day, then proactively remove the friction that gets in their way. Small, disconnected inconveniences, a confusing process here, an unclear policy there, add up to what can feel like death by a thousand cuts: friction that quietly erodes trust, retention, and enrollment long before a student decides to leave. This workshop is one piece of that larger retention strategy. Over two days, you and a cross-functional team from academic affairs and student affairs will use our Service Excellence Model and journey mapping to see your campus the way your students do, then build a concrete plan for the policy and culture changes that close those gaps. You’ll leave with an implementation roadmap that connects your retention strategy to what’s actually happening on the ground for students.
Session Descriptions
More details about the event schedule can be found by clicking Learn More and Register, but session descriptions of the two days are below:
Our Framework—and Defining “Student-Centered”
Clarity of definition is a prerequisite for meaningful change. To start, we’ll share our Service Excellence Model that fosters a student-centered campus and identify what “student-centered” means. Through guided discussion and examples, you’ll distinguish between surface-level practices and true institutional commitment.
Introduction to the Customer Service Assessment Tool
In this session, we’ll explore the Customer Service Assessment Tool, a unique tool which will help you and colleagues to evaluate your current efforts and areas for growth.
Establishing Service Standards for a Student-Centered Institution
This working session will press you to consider decision-making, communication, responsiveness, and impact in creating service standards for your institution.
Translating Standards into Leadership
Now that you’ve set standards, what leadership skills are needed to uphold them and bring them to life on campus? This session will utilize the Academic Impressions Leadership Framework to help you to connect your standards directly to behaviors that foster accountability.
From Leadership to Implementation
Where should you begin to foster your student-centered campus? In this session, you’ll work to identify the student lifecycle through journey mapping to inform your work, and you’ll also identify the policies, processes, decisions, and people that must be involved.
Your Implementation Roadmap
We’ve set aside time for you to map out what it means to implement your plan, so that you arrive back on campus ready to begin.
Leading Through Resistance
Any culture change is challenging, and resistance is normal. This session will help you to evaluate where you can anticipate resistance and how to overcome it.
Assessing (Again)
Once you have implemented your service standards and plan, how will you know if you’re making gains toward student-centeredness? We’ll examine how to gather feedback and what mechanisms need to be utilized (or created).
Reward and Recognition
How will you reward the behaviors you want to see? This brainstorming session will give you a chance to identify what those behaviors are and how to effectively encourage them.
Who Should Attend:
Senior leaders who can affect change around whether a campus is student-centered will benefit most from this event. This includes Provosts, Vice Presidents and Associate Vice Presidents of Student Affairs, Vice Presidents of Student Success, and Deans of Students.
How You Will Use This to Move Work Forward
- Provosts: Audit your academic policy and experience through a student lens.
- VPs/AVPs of Student Affairs: Turn the friction your team already sees day to day into a coordinated culture and policy fix.
- VPs of Student Success: Connect your retention strategy to what students are actually experiencing, not just what the dashboard shows.
- Deans: Bring the classroom and advising perspective into an institution-wide push for retention.
Student success is everyone’s responsibility, and structural change rarely holds if only one person in the room understands it. That’s why this workshop is also well suited for small groups: bring along the academic affairs, student success, and student affairs professionals on your team who are charged with moving the needle on retention and persistence. When you work through the material together, you’ll leave with shared language and a plan the whole team can execute, not just the leader who attended. Register 3 or more people and save more than $1,000! Discounts will be automatically applied at checkout.
What makes our events different?
Academic Impressions workshops provide the opportunity for quality conversations and relationship-building through both formal and informal networking opportunities in an intimate setting. Our in-depth and hands-on approach to learning provides you with actionable takeaways.
Learn More About the Academic Impressions Workshop Experience ➞
Grow Leadership. Maximize Your Budget.
Empower your team with professional development that pays off. Our Workshop Flex Packs help you build leadership capacity while saving money. Discounts are automatically applied at checkout.
Pricing
October 14-15, 2026
Denver, CO
Starting at:
-
Non-Member Price: $2,495
/person
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Member Price: $2,245
/person
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Teams: Save $2,000+
for teams of 3 or more
Members get a $250 discount
Additional optional add-ons are available during checkout.
Questions About the Event?
Heath Boice-Pardee
Head of Practice in Service Excellence, Academic Impressions
Learn More about Heath Boice-Pardee|
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